PiDP-8/I Software

Changes To OS Compatibility
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Changes to "OS Compatibility" between 2019-05-11 22:07:04 and 2019-07-22 21:44:09

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# The Situation

Although the core software underlying the PiDP-8/I software distribution is broadly portable, the dominance of Raspbian in the Raspberry Pi space means it gets the most attention when it comes to testing and development. This article documents what it known to work, where, today.

If you need the software to work on some platform where it currently doesn't, [we accept patches!](/doc/trunk/HACKERS.md) You can also send problem reports [to our development forum](/forum), file a [bug report](/bugs), or [discuss it on the users' mailing list](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pidp-8).
If you need the software to work on some platform where it currently doesn't, [we accept patches!](/doc/trunk/HACKERS.md) You can also send problem reports [to our development forum](/forum), file a [bug report](/bugs), or [discuss it on the users' mailing list][ml].


# Raspbian, Debian, Ubuntu

The current stable release of the PiDP-8/I software distribution was built for and tested with the [Raspbian Stretch Lite](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-stretch/) distribution. Prior releases were built atop the [Raspbian Jessie Lite](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-jessie-is-here/) distribution; current software should still work on Jessie, though we no longer test that, having upgraded all of our development systems to Stretch.
The current stable release of the PiDP-8/I software distribution was built for and tested with the [Raspbian Stretch Lite](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-stretch/) (v9) distribution. The software should also work well on the non-Lite version.

Prior releases were built atop the [Raspbian Jessie Lite](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-jessie-is-here/) (v8) distribution, but somewhere along the line, we broke compatibility with Jessie. It's probably simple to fix the problem — we think it's a systemd version compatibility issue — but if you need to keep running on Jessie, which is now out of support, we recommend that you keep running contemporaneous versions of the PiDP-8/I software atop it. Version 2017.04.04 was the last version specifically tested atop Jessie.

We have not yet tried the PiDP-8/I software on Raspbian Buster (v10), released in early July 2019. If you've tried it, please report it [on the forum](/forum) or [on the mailing list][ml], whether successful or not.

Raspbian-based OSes like [pipaOS](http://pipaos.mitako.eu/) should also work, but this is not tested by the project's current developers.

The project's primary maintainer occasionally builds the software on Debian and Ubuntu systems as well, which works fine, since Raspbian and Ubuntu are both derivatives of Debian. On such systems, the software is designed to detect the absence of the PiDP-8/I front panel hardware and work without it.

Because of that success, we expect it will run on any other Debian derivative, too.

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     $ bin/pdp8 boot/0.script

...and so forth.

It is possible that the improvements announced at [Build 2019](https://news.microsoft.com/build2019/) to [WSL 2](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/) and [the Windows console](https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal) will solve these remaining pty and terminal emulation problems. Until they're addressed, the above choices are better options.

As with Cygwin, there are portability fixes on trunk now that are not yet released.

[ml]: (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pidp-8)